But Now, And Before My Boat Had Touched
The Quay, I Saw That The Island Must Be Ignored - If Possible.
The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the
year seems to have cast a blight upon it.
The very few palms have a
drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and
much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which
seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the
receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to
the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on
disease. But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any
outrage. Again I turned toward "Pharaoh's Bed," toward the temple
standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near
Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of
straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from
a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water,
but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.
I went first to "Pharaoh's Bed."
Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as
exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's statue of the
Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the
entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf
complexion - one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian
women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity, with the
flame of passion behind it.
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